Communication as Evolutionary Phenomenon

Evolutionary Economics struggles in its attempts to search for the reliable minor structures that could be investigated in the scheme of variety, heredity, and selection.

Ulrich Witt (1999: 22) asks: “What are the economic entities whose representation over time is supposed to be changed in a systematic way by selection?“ Witt dis-cusses the possibility to put some economic phenomena into a Darwinian evolution-ary scheme that we have treated in Part I, e.g. consumer goods and services, and firm’s routines (1999: 23f.). His conclusion is, as we have seen likewise, that this bears many difficulties, especially due to the capability of learning and reflexivity (Lamarckian evolution). In terms of the evolutionary process, with the principles of variety, heredity and selection, phenomena like imagination and environmental cir-cumstances, introduced in the former sections, are even more difficult, if not impos-sible, to handle. They may rather be treated and investigated as epiphenomena, just like epigenetics is concerned with the environment of genes, the phenotype.⁸² How-ever, Witt’s solution to face the difficulties that occur when investigating the eco-nomic evolutionary process is to avoid Darwinism (1999: 24). In the reminder of this work I want to refer to a phenomenon that is at the heart of the evolution of so-ciety: communication. Understanding communicational bits in analogy to genes may bring the Darwinian scheme back into the focus. They tend to have a rather stable structure once they are introduced into the society. Researching communication structures may be interesting for some questions that are raised by evolutionary economists.

With Luhmann, we will again start from scratch in order show resemblances to genes. According to Luhmann “variation can be seen as an unusual message, but also – and probably more often – as a non-expected non-acceptance of a message”

(Luhmann 1997: 459, translation and emphasis by SH).⁸³ Hence, it is a communica-tive contradiction to expectancies, i.e. to the conservacommunica-tive force of “as usual” (1997:

461). According to this, variation, in the most cases, is not the outcome of

82 In fact, epigenetics brings the Lamarckian scheme back into biology. According to epigenetics characteristics obtained by the environment can indeed be inherited. The genes themselves, the genotype, do not change, but there are mechanisms in the chromosome (e.g. the structure of the chromatin, or methyl groups) that activate, or inactivate respectively, genes. These mechanisms can change and be inherited. Karberg and Friebe (2004) mention an observation that descendants of parents that suffered a famine in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague during World War 2 show a significantly high risk of suffering obesity, diabetes, heart-disease and cancer. This counts even for grandchildren. It is assumed that these inheritances are caused by inheritance of a certain struc-ture of methyl groups that can change in a lifetime and inactivate genes.

83 The term “non-expected non-acceptance” refers to the conservative forces in communication. In order to be adaptable we do most often accept offerings of communicative meaning. Harold Garfinkel (1967) made many experiments, in which he interpreted communicative offers differ-ently on purpose in order to disturb the communication, for example: Hello, how are your doing? / Oh I am feeling very bad, I have pain and a headache, and yesterday my teeth hurt the whole day.

tions of something new, but of constitutions of something with negative relations to existing elements.⁸⁴ It is, therefore, a function to link up communication, even if afterwards the potential content of communication – meaning – is more heterogene-ous and tents to bear conflicts. As everyday life is full of such communication, those conflicts are in most cases trifling ones; they show the characteristics of a bagatelle (1997: 462).⁸⁵ However, such communicative objections happen, and they are the main driving force of evolution. If they are adopted, conflicts will occur, and these are the fruit of the evolutionary process: “When a No wins as an outcome of a con-flict, we can assume that this No has passed a first test and proved its staying power.” (1997: 466, translation by SH)

In the course of human history rejections of the content of communication, meaning, has been a very common issue. In early stages it had, comparable to nowadays, no big consequences. Most often rejections have been forgotten. With the development of writing this was changing. The ability to store such rejections led to the ability to face them later on and without the necessity to be present during the communicative act. This led to an increase in the amount of further variations (1997:

464). We see how remarkably similar this conception is to Schumpeter’s conception of innovative action. The entrepreneur, likewise, disturbs a harmony and has to pass many tests and to prove staying power in order to challenge the conservative envi-ronment. But it is this kind of negative force that causes the development of the eco-nomical system. We see, furthermore, that this kind of communicational evolution has nothing to do with learning effects (like routines), nor with the problem that they are assembled out of heterogeneous pieces like products and services. Communica-tive acts like those described are, just as genes, indeed describable as mutating, or as erroneous copies if you like.

Investigating communication may promise to open up a rather different field of economic research with regard to evolutionary processes. When we just think about the emergence of new expressions since the beginning of the 1990s, i.e. since the adoption of the World Wide Web, we can imagine interesting questions about the course of evolving of this rather new field of business. Other sources could be busi-ness journals or newspaper sections. Works in Corpus Linguistics – e.g. using the corpus of business languages (Nelson 2000) – may offer a starting point in order to implement the usage of language in evolutionary research. It may at least be a sup-portive tool to understand certain characterisations of economic fields.

84 This resembles the notion of “de-correlation” of knowledge (Metcalfe 2004: 167). Luhmann does not discuss the character of novelty (“an unusual message”), which is the first case and more sel-dom. We can assume that even the most unusual message does not evolve from scratch. It might be a negation of communicative meaning as well, even if a very obscure one in which we cannot find a connection to existing messages. I will not go any further to verify this assumption, as it is not of sufficient importance in our case.

85 Probably not trifling to psychologists, nor to sociologists with close relations to social-psychology.

In such perspectives the extension of what is trifling and what is not might be larger.

Another field could be to investigate linguistic pragmatics, i.e. the intentions that are involved by using certain communication patterns. Communication patterns, once successful introduced, are relatively stable. We may associate them with genes.

Then we would have to find an economic environment in which these idioms play the relevant role. This might be rather difficult, but as learned from philosophy of language, and of course from sociolinguists, usage of communication patterns means action, hence it means human behaviour. In his 1993 book, Michael Lynch named a chapter instructively “Molecular Sociology”, that sets up a research program which is based on ethnomethodological studies of conversations (Lynch 1993). The so-called Conversation Analysis investigates the micro-structures of human conversa-tions. Since the early 1970s Harvey Sacks and others (1974) have been investigating actor’s technique of “turn taking” during conversations. In saying that this is a tech-nique they insist on the context-free and stable character of this kind of action. This makes it interesting for our purpose. Like techniques in genetic engineering, where evolutionary processes are simulated and reproduced, such techniques are stable and basic; and like a gene pool, combinations of them build a certain structure of con-versation. A lengthier quotation of Lynch may illustrate this:

“A key difference between a microsociology, in which individual actors are the most elemen-tary constituents, and a molecular sociology, in which embodied techniques are foundational, is that the latter units are essentially plural and heterogeneous. There is no idealized concept of the fundamental sociotechnique parallel to that of the social actor. [..] Instead, CA’s [i.e. Con-versation Analysis, SH] molecular sociology begins with a conception of social order in which different combinations of heterogeneous techniques produce an endless variety of complex structures. This conception is distinctive for the way it is social structural all the way down.

The basic unit of analysis is not an ideal-typical ‘actor’ or ‘self’ but a plurality of socially structured techniques through which orderly social activities are assembled. The research agenda is to unpack these molecular sequences.” (Lynch 1993: 258f.)

Lynch is clearly in the line of population thinking. He also rejects essentialism when he argues against the “ideal-typical ‘actor’ or ‘self’”. The analogy is rather based on praxis and technology of genetic engineering than on the natural gene-based evolu-tion:⁸⁶

“The analogy [..] is based [..] on the production of routine molecular biological techniques. [..]

The ‘social molecules’ in this case are not small ‘things’ to be scrutinized scientifically but are sequences of observables and reportable technique that compose a scientific investigation.”

(1993: 259f.)

It is still a long journey to obtain well-defined patterns of communication-techniques in order to use them in evolutionary economics. We can imagine the mere amount of conversational techniques and how manifold structures are that those techniques build in every day conversation, even if we are concerned with a narrower social setting such as economic action. To quest for the relevant communication patterns, the social world approach might be helpful, again. With its concentration on “going concern” patterns it could demarcate the potential pattern environment. As seen,

86 In fact, it is a kind of a threefold analogy: Genetic engineers replicate genetic evolution with the biology’s own means (Lynch 1993: 261), and social communication follows such patterns, too.

social worlds can be related to certain economical territories that are not shaped by institutional borders but by patterns of activity. We have discussed how to observe such patterns. However, the social world perspective could serve here, as well, as an exploration frame in order to demarcate the relevant patterns of communication.

All kinds of manifestation of communication can be taken into account. Up to now, there is done a great amount of work, for example in linguistics. We could re-fer their data to our interpretative scheme of evolution of the economy. We could also investigate certain periodicals that deal with a certain kind of innovation. What words are used in a periodical, in what context, and how do those words change?

Dopfer’s notion of efficacy is interesting here. Only “efficacious cognition and effi-cacious behavior” is successful within the economic system (2004: 188). With re-gards to population analysis this means that the amount of such cognition and haviour increases. Using this framework, but employing instead of cognition or be-haviour its social manifestations, i.e. words and expressions on the one hand, or communication patterns on the other, we could state that in a certain field an increas-ing amount of expressions or communicative patterns over time are more or less adaptable, and hence more or less efficacious. As Metcalfe at al. argue (2000: 12):

“Evolutionary theories are naturally accounts of the rate and direction in which the world changes.” Our aim would be to investigate “the rate and direction” of change of an innovative field with means of investigating the population of expressions and communication structures. Population research is probably one of the most powerful tools for future evolutionary economic research. Communicative patterns, due to their stable character, are especially predestined to be used in this respect.

Conclusion

Simplification is necessary in order to build concise models. But it can be dangerous and harmful if models are not revised, even if this would mean to dismiss them as a whole. Neoclassical economics may have proven to display the economic world when it is in a rather static state. But it is not able to explain the most important phe-nomenon that causes capitalist dynamics: introduction of novelty. When thinking about the dynamics of the capitalist world, Josef A. Schumpeter’s theory about the entrepreneur deserves remaining recognition. From our perspective from ninety years after his Theory of Economic Development one might ask why this important insight does not let to a dismiss of neoclassical frames that try to explain economic development without explaining emergence. Other economic fields suffer similar discrepancies between theory and real life. When Pierre Bourdieu (1997) complains that social workers must repair what from neoclassical theories inspired policy-makers have carried out, he refers to nothing else than to critiques about conjunc-tures of perfect knowledge and profit maximising motivations. Like in social politics these assumption have nothing to do with the real world in entrepreneurship. If in-formation, and hence knowledge, was available by anyone at any time anywhere, and if anybody wanted to maximise his profits, we would have indeed an equilib-rium state. But we would not have any development or progress.

Evolutionary Economics is a promising endeavour in order to give a concise pic-ture of the capitalist system. Unlike neoclassical economics the evolutionary frame-work deals with the human being as it is not as it should be. Not least because of this is it a rather open frame that allows other social-science disciplines taking part in its endeavour. The many approaches of evolutionary economics that try to explain mo-tivations, preferences, bounded rationality, historical chance, etc. lead, nevertheless to one problem. They explain only certain characteristics of the evolutionary eco-nomic project. They are not the theory itself. Rather they are (important) parts of evolutionary economics as a grand theory. As Ernst Mayr argues in the epilogue of his large monograph about biological theories, and in the context of his desire to employ population thinking in science studies: Robert Merton’s work on the scien-tific actor is not the theory of science itself but only a part of it, even though an im-portant one (Mayr 1982: 830). The big picture still waits to be drawn, in science studies as well as in economics. Concerning the latter, it has to be assembled around mechanisms that have to do with emergence of variation, heredity, and a process of selection.

Evolutionary economics is a promising field in which other social science disci-plines can find their home. Herbert Simon’s notion of ‘bounded rationality’ has opened the economic realm to very different academic fields. I am not sure whether the consequences of this release – the abandonment of time- and contextless ration-ality – are considered yet. This might be the starting point for many disciplines that

never followed such conjectures. One possible framework is that of social worlds with its handy focus on primary activities. It shows some possibilities to think of the entrepreneur’s function in more detail. We have discovered, for example, that on certain stages not only extra thought capabilities are necessary, but also the ability to negotiate. Furthermore, we may classify the entrepreneur’s characteristics like will to conquer and certain identities not as phenomena of individuals but as shared in groups. Things like innovations must be doable and that is often a matter of negotia-tions among social members – individuals as well as groups. The social world ap-proach is able to portray such processes of negotiations. It has even been used to interpret organisational development in an evolutionary scheme. I have suggested using such a framework for exploring social observables that could constitute the basic elements in modelling or population research. Especially the evolutionary eco-nomic theory of the present, which is still in an emerging state, should be open to the social sciences’ multifarious attempts to offer a picture about the world we live in – just because it postulates itself the importance of variety in early stages of develop-ment in certain economic fields.

The picture of evolutionary economics has necessarily remained incomplete in this work. The institutional strand, game theoretical approaches, as well as the whole field of economics on industrial and technological development that is part of, or at least closely connected with, evolutionary economics could not be dedicated. The same counts for questions about the evolutionary process itself. Selection processes as well as the characteristics of the units of selection are by far more complex than I could show in this work. However, there may have been raised some interesting questions for further research. There is, for example, the notion of contingency. The explanatory power that may lie in the existence of not realised possibilities on the one hand, and in actors’ imaginations on the other, should not be underestimated if we assume that an evolutionary process is very wasteful. In Part III there were sug-gested some points on which investigation of such phenomena could start. Many social phenomena must be taken into account that are between the individual’s psy-chological disposition and an economic system. This is another outcome of this work. The mistake should be avoided to substitute one model of oversimplification for another one that will show similar discontinuities in near or far future.

References

Alchian, A.A. 1950: Uncertainty, Evolution, and Economic Theory. In: The Journal of Political Economy 58 (3), pp.211-221.

Andersen, E.S. 1996: Paperback reprint, ch.1 of Evolutionary Economics: Post-Schumpeterian Con-tributions. London: Pinter

(URL: http://www.business.auc.dk/evolution/esapapers/esa96/EE1.pdf. [21.7.2004]).

Arthur, B.W. 1989: Competing Technologies, Increasing Returns and Lock-in by Historical Events.

In: Economic Journal 99, pp.116-131.

Blaug, M. 1992/1980: The Methodology of Economics, or, How Economists Explain. Cambridge:

University of Cambridge Press.

Blumer, H. 1969: Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. Berkeley: University of Cali-fornia Press.

Bourdieu, P. 1997: Der Tote packt den Lebenden. Hamburg: VSA-Verlag.

Bradach, J.L. and R.G. Eccles 1989: Price, Authority and Trust: From Ideal Types to Plural Forms.

In: Annual Review of Sociology , pp.97-118.

Bucher, R. and A.L. Strauss 1961: Professions in Process. In: American Journal of Sociology 66, pp.325-334.

Callon, M. 1995: Four Models for the Dynamics of Science. In: Jasanoff, S. et al. (eds.), Handbook of Science and Technology Studies. London et al.: Sage, pp.29-63.

Campbell, D.T. 1987a/1974: Evolutionary Epistemology. In: Radnitzky, G. and W.W. Bartly (eds.), Evolutionary Epistemology, Rationality, and the Sociology of Knowledge. La Salle: Open Court, pp.47-89.

Campbell, D.T. 1987b/1960: Blind Variation and Selective Retention in Creative Thought as in Other Knowledge Processes. In: Radnitzky, G. and W.W. Bartly (eds.), Evolutionary Epistemology, Rationality, and the Sociology of Knowledge. La Salle: Open Court, pp.91-114.

Clarke, A.E. 1990: A Social Worlds Research Adventure. The Case of Reproductive Science. In:

Cozzens, S.E. and T.F. Gieryn (eds.), Theories of Science in Society. Bloomington et al.: Indi-ana University Press, pp.15-42.

Clarke, A.E. 1991: Social Worlds / Arenas Theory as Organizational Theory. In: Maines, D.R. (ed.), Social Organization and Social Process: Essays in Honor of Anselm Strauss. New York: Al-dine de Gruyter, pp.119-158.

Clarke, A.E. 1998: Disciplining Reproduction: Modernity, American Life Sciences, and 'the Prob-lems of Sex'. Berkeley / Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Clarke, A.E. and E.M. Gerson 1990: Symbolic Interactionism in Social Studies of Science. In:

Becker, H.S. and M.M. McCall (eds.), Symbolic Interaction and Cultural Studies. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, pp.179-214.

University of Chicago Press, pp.179-214.